I was recently asked to work on Automating the on-premise Active Directory Account creation. The idea was simple – Hiring manager fills up a form with the required details about the new joinee and submits and then the account should get created in On-premise AD and eventually be synced with Azure AD with required licenses assigned. The obvious expectation was to use available tools only which come as part of Office 365 E3 license suite. Implicit Requirements Even though the stated requirements seem quite straight forward, there were a few implicit ones which had to be taken care of: The […]

Alert Policies are a bit of hidden gems in Office 365. There are a wide list of activities which can be tracked using these alert policies and a notification can be received when such activities/events occur. As per the official definition, we can use alert policies to track user and admin activities, malware threats, or data loss incidents in Office 365. After choosing the activity you want to be alerted on, refine the policy by adding conditions, deciding when to trigger the alert, and who should receive notifications. Alert Policies Alert Policies are part of Office 365 Security & Compliance […]

Automatic content classification or metadata tagging has been one of the “wishes” for knowledge workers across organizations. SharePoint has provided a solution for Managed Metadata and manual tagging for long and some third party solutions exist which claim to provide automatic keywords extraction from the content of the uploaded documents. In this article, we will explore how can we use Azure Text Analytics Service to Automatically Tag Documents stored in SharePoint from the keywords extracted from the content of those documents. So, let’s’ get started. Prerequisites Before we can jump in to extract keywords from SharePoint documents, we need to setup […]

Microsoft Flow is getting better and better with each passing day. It now has thousands of templates to get you started quickly and provides connectors for hundreds of other services. Flow can be invoked from across various external applications as well, but I guess, the most immediate users would come from SharePoint world 🙂 I wrote an article earlier about how Microsoft Flow can be used to Enable Incoming Mails in SharePoint Online. In this article, I am going to explain how to connect with SharePoint Online, extract some data using REST Services and send it for further processing. Getting […]

File shares have been a beloved way to store and share documents around various groups for years. Even though, many organizations moved to collaborative solutions like SharePoint years ago, File Shares didn’t lose their charm. Because of the ease of usage and historical knowhow, it continued to grow both in size and usage over years. I know many organizations who store say 5 terabytes of data in SharePoint, still have four times more data in File Shares. But things are not all rosy with File Shares. Why Move out of File Shares Let’s a take quick look at why we […]

Many organizations have been flirting with Microsoft Teams since Microsoft announced at Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida few months ago, that it plans to kill off Skype for Business in favor of Microsoft Teams. With so many new features and added functionalities Office 365, which is growing at faster pace than most IT department can digest 🙂 Let’s take a look at how to get started with teams and what works and what’s not so. What is Microsoft Teams I won’t re-invent the wheel and just refer some already published articles. As per one of the MS blogs -“It’s a new […]

A few days ago, many of the users of our SharePoint Online environment complained about not being able to access the portal and were getting a blank page when accessing on Internet Explorer. Now, since the site was accessible perfectly fine with Chrome browser, there was no way to suspect any issue from SharePoint Online side itself. First Thoughts We had implemented a redirection from an On-premise IIS site to SharePoint Online site using Smart Links. This was because, our business users wanted to use a known URL like https://mycompany.com to access the portal site, instead of https://mycompany.sharepoint.com and still […]

I had setup a cloud Hybrid Search environment for one of my customers with SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint Online. It was working fine for past few weeks, until one fine day for almost all the users started getting the error message “Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerException: Query execution is only allowed with IgnoreSafeQueryPropertiesTemplateUrl=true when the user has the UseRemoteAPIs permission” when searched from on-prem environment. Cloud Hybrid and Federated Setup Just to share some background about the environment setup, I had followed the recommended approach for setting up the cloud hybrid environment and all the content was correctly getting indexed in Office 365. The […]

In my previous article, I wrote about how can we create an simple Azure chat bot based on one of the default template, Forms Flow, that Azure Bot comes with. That is good to get us started but to make anything useful, we need to extend the bot. In this article I am going to talk about how can we extend the Azure Chat bot with Forms Flow, we created last time, and Integrate it with SharePoint. This logic can be used to integrate both with SharePoint on-premise (2013 and 2016) and Online. Problem Statement We are going to extend […]

Recently I was encountered with a question about implementing Google Analytics in a SharePoint on-premise environment that triggered a discussion, whether we should choose Google Analytics or look for Azure Application Insights, which is available in Azure stack. Azure was in use already since SharePoint Servers were hosted on Azure VMs and the Application Insight reports look quite impressive. I started to look into more details about what to expect from both of these. Google Analytics Lets take a look at the Google Analytics first. Google analytics is intended for website usage tracking and traffic optimization, has a nice dashboard and is […]